Plugins PoseHelper

[Nickon7777]

Nickon7777 submitted a new resource:

PoseHelper - User-friendly interface for character pose editing

The plugin is intended for easier control of the char body parts position and rotation. Moreover it gives the possibility to calculate the part positions through the anchor point and the vector angles. For example, you can adjust the elbow angle value to rotate the hand controller over current elbow position. This feature referred as “parametric control”.
View attachment 422006
Features:

• Control over all char’s controllers position/rotation in single UI view...

Read more about this resource...

 

[Nobis]

Lol that thumbnail tho ;D Been there

 

[VirtuaBanger]

This would make it very easy to create a "pop and lock" animation.

 

[Nickon7777]

Nickon7777 updated PoseHelper with a new update entry:

undo, mirror

* more undo/redo feature
* plugin disable/enable does full controllers read (undoable)
* limb mirroring now does hand/foot rotation based on direct angles

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[1943439974]

I have always used VR to animate because moving joints under a desktop is too cumbersome. But today I discovered this plugin and this plugin saved me.

This new plug-in has only been released for a few days. I guess it will be updated in the future. I have a good idea and hope the author can refer to it.

There are too many options now. To pose a pose requires switching back and forth between five pages, which makes it a bit cumbersome.

If they can be simplified into one page, for example: put two positions in a joint and two rotation variables together, arranged like a layer cake, this can save a lot of space. The left and right hands, left leg and right leg can also be controlled by switching.

In this way, space is saved, and all content can be placed on one page without jumping back and forth.

 

[Nickon7777]

Thank you for sharing your experience!
As I understand you wand to mix all controls in one screen to avoid tab switching.
Unfortunately I do not understand the way you want to archive that.

put two positions in a joint and two rotation variables together

VaM plugin UI provide just one control for numeric value editing. Can you provide me a reference of a plugin of just a screenshot of such "combined" UI control?

can also be controlled by switching

What "switching" do you mean?
For now the plugin has 7x3x5 = 105 number to control. The only way I see now to fit them in a single screen is to 1) get rid of most of them and 2) make the controls be smaller. For example I can try to remove "direct" values (yielding in 4x3x4 sliders out) but more than 50 controls on a screen is too much anyway. So I can make a new tab "Limbs" with copies of "parametric" (green) values of limbs only yielding in 4x7 = 28 slider in total organized in 4 columns. This way you have to switch just between two tabs.
That is just a speculations. All depends on your user experience and what control you can really to sacrifice. You can provide me a sketch drawing what controls you need and how to organize it on the screen.

 

[1943439974]

Thanks for your reply.

What I just said was too vague. The idea of controls is specifically like the picture.
To put it simply, if the controls in the same location are concentrated below, no special text labeling is required.
Regarding switching, the controls in the right hand and left hand, and the right foot and left foot are exactly the same, so I think they can share a set of controls and quickly switch through buttons. In this way, only one-fifth of the content is left. Three.

Finally, it will be possible to shrink it a little and put it on one page.

Sorry, my painting is too ugly

 

[1943439974]

I counted it, and in the end only 63 controls were left.

According to the layout of the picture, if you remove the fonts, it only takes up about half of the original space. Then you can put 42 controls. Then remove the labels above and reduce the controls appropriately, and it is almost enough.

 

[Nickon7777]

I'm grateful for your explanation. I'm really sorry but I still can't figure out how to reduce the number of sliders (you mentioned 63 and 42). Please try to draw a complete view of the screen with all the sliders, text labels and buttons as you suggest. Your painting is just fine. You can use the attachment as a reference.
On your picture I just see the plugin's tab0 "Torso" with almost the same sliders (18 of 21) but arranged vertically rather than horizontally.
I made some screenshot of my thoughts. You can observe a prefab with 5x21 sliders without caption and input filed for numeric values (i find the last as must-have components though, I use keyboard input method all-the-time).

 

[1943439974]

After listening to what you said, I tried to arrange it in the picture and found that I was wrong. You're right, it would be too difficult to put the whole thing into one interface anyway, it would take at least two pages.
Just forget what I said before, I don’t have any good ideas.
As you said before, you can put commonly used controls on the first page, or separate controls that control one joint or multiple joints, or other ideas.
By reducing the page to two, the user's pressure is greatly reduced! ! ——————————
Vertical alignment is a really good idea though, that's another thing. My idea is to make them smaller and more compact, so that the user only needs to move the mouse slightly to reach them. At the same time, this will be more intuitive, because with a little familiarity, you can know what the six (or nine) controls represent, without judging from the text of the annotations.
Now that the distance between each control is equidistant, it is a bit confusing to find things. After adopting vertical arrangement, we can make the controls of the same joint closer, and the controls of different joints further apart, and then add a " Words like "chest" and "knee" are much more comfortable.

 

[Nickon7777]

I apologize in advance for the another very long message.
For your information, I consider the interface to be a very important part of my plugin. I spent a lot of time designing it. A large part of the work is related to simplification (yes! simpler things are harder to do!) and unification for reuse in other projects. The current design does not contain unnecessary complications. Since no one has declared the current design completely unsuitable, I consider it to be correct. In fact, I have already considered all your suggestions at the design stage. And they were rejected due to a low ratio of benefit to complexity of implementation.
More details on each thought.

1) You want to do everything in one screen and for this you agree to sacrifice the size of the sliders, their labels and even the input fields for the numerical value. Please consider the following: the shorter the slider (horizontally), the worse the resolution of the value adjustment. The current resolution is about 13 mm/pixel and 1 degree/pixel, which is ALREADY unsatisfactory for my personal tasks. The adjusting task goes to some kind of a pixel hunting. This is why there are input fields that I use to manual enter.
2) You want to put a common labels to the left of the slider group (like in the picture). Or you want more sliders in a row. This way you shorten the slider. Moreover putting labels to the left is really hard to implement.
3) You want to visually separate the slider blocks by making a gap. Okay, I thought about that too. It's not that obvious, but unfortunately it's actually much harder to implement than it looks! Partly for this reason I made the header coloring as an easier alternative. But I can do that if you think that separation would really help.
Going back to your very first message.
I really want to improve your personal usability. So consider that we are designing the contents of your personal tab. But I'm still not clear about your personal preferences. Please try on my role and design your personal tab using moving/copying/scaling sliders/texts and the provided attachments in a simple graphics editor. This will help you to check usability of your own ideas, and for me - to better understand your needs.

 

[1943439974]

Please try on my role and design your personal tab using moving/copying/scaling sliders/texts and the provided attachments in a simple graphics editor. This will help you to check usability of your own ideas, and for me - to better understand your needs.

I want to use it, but I get an error. how do i use it

 

[Nickon7777]

I meant using a things like Paint
The VaM error message means it seems you choose wrong plugin's main script - select PoseHelper.cslist file instead. See the video on the Overview page.

 

[1943439974]

Thank you for your continued attention. At the same time, it turns out that you have given more thought to the improvement of the plug-in than me. This made me start to think about whether my improvement method was too hasty (will such modifications become efficient? There is a question mark on this matter)

You asked me to provide UI layout, I can't reply to you quickly. Maybe I need to confirm more things, right now I only have the outline of an idea. Also, I may need to spend more time with the plugin so I can decide which features to drop

 

[cmramlow]

Finally had time to really test this plugin out and maybe found a bug - when I try to use the IArm.pitch to raise to arm up to try and create a Y pose the arm just jerks forward with no further ability to move it and the Undo action button doesn't work.

Be awesome if there was an undo all, or even better, to reset the persons original pose used before starting to utilize the plugin. Thank you @Nickon7777

 

[Nickon7777]

@cmramlow thank you for your anxiety.

maybe found a bug

This is a known and correct behavior. This is how mathematics works. In the video below I demonstrate how to do such pose along with undo feature test.

Here some explanation. I apologize in advance for the possibly incorrect terminology - English is not my native language. You can better learn it in wiki
If the θ angle (in our case it is roll) tends to zero (in our case it is -90), then the direction of the arm is fixed on the horizontal axis and no longer depends on the φ angle (pitch in our case). In other words, the θ angle defines a cone surface along which the hand moves when the φ angle changes. At zero angle, the cone collapses into a straight line. Therefore, to make a Y-pose, you need to set the roll at -45 and the pitch at -180.
About the undo function. Currently, the plugin's undo stack size is 5. Every time you change a number, the buffer is occupied, which may push out some "older" value from the buffer. That is, I suppose you made much attempts to adjust the hand position, so you probably "spent" all 5 buffer cells on values at which the hand position does not change. When you press undo, the slider numeric values should change, but you probably didn't notice it because you didn't observe the hand position change. Please check it out.

to reset the persons original pose

In fact, such feature already exists. As it is said in the description for plugin version 2 and at the end of the video on the Overview page, manual disabling/enabling the plugin reads all the controllers and puts them in the undo buffer making the possibility to undo it and go back to the pose before. But this data will be pushed out after 5 value changes (which is of course not usable). Please explain to me in what case you might need the ability to "reset" so that I can think about how to implement it.

 

[cmramlow]

Thank you the patient explanation @Nickon7777 I understand math now and how this works

 

[Nickon7777]

Nickon7777 updated PoseHelper with a new update entry:

mirror, limbs root point rotation

* body measurement mechanics slightly changed
* undo/redo bugfixes (still, expected to be bugged
* limbs mirror ability now does not move target limb root point
* hips rotation now is independent from the torso* rotation (green)
+ chest/hips rotation value now rotates arms/legs root point (for some extent for chest rotation)
+ leg mirror now consider hip yaw (only)

Unfortunately, chest yaw rotation is discarded for arm roots points calculation, since this creates ambiguity for the...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[Nickon7777]

Nickon7777 updated PoseHelper with a new update entry:

Version 3. Morphs system

+ Morph feature (in progress).
* Undo stack expanded to 15.

Now you can edit morphs value right from the new tab in the plugin UI! The plugin supplied with some restricted set of built-in morphs. But you can override default morph list with file:
[vam]\Custom\Scripts\Nickon\PoseHelper\MorphBanks.json
The file content is defined as follow:

{
   "bank 1 name" : [
      "morph name 1",
      "morph name 2"
    ],
    "bank 2 name" : [
      "morph name 3"...

Read the rest of this update entry...